If Jennifer Toth ’11 could write her patients’ clinical reports on one of her vintage typewriters — she has four in her collection, circa 1930s to 1960s — she would be happy to merge two things she loves. But, Jennifer knows that the urgency of those reports requires modern technology, and she’s laser-focused on the immediate needs of her patients and their families.
Pediatric oncology is deeply personal to Jennifer, who was diagnosed with hepatoblastoma at two-and-a-half years old and treated successfully at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Her healthcare providers, especially Pat Brophy, a nurse practitioner, changed her life, and, without question, she knew she wanted to work in the medical field one day.
In high school, she spent a summer shadowing various types of medical professionals after being accepted to the Virginia Governor’s School for Life Sciences and Medicine, and the experience solidified her specialization. “A light bulb just went off,” she says, “‘Of course, I’m going to be a nurse practitioner!’ It felt like the obvious decision and the right choice.” In 2015, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) School of Nursing with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing and returned to CHOP — this time to work as a bedside nurse.
Periodically, she ran into the healthcare staff who had been part of her treatment team when she was a patient, which she says “was a rewarding coming-full-circle moment. Sometimes it was a little intimidating just because I had always looked up to and respected them so much that to be a colleague was sometimes hard to believe.”
She stayed at CHOP for four years and, during that time, enrolled part-time in the Pediatric Acute Care Nurse Practitioner program at Penn’s School of Nursing. In 2019, she earned a Master of Science in Nursing with a concentration in oncology. The timing felt right to move closer to family, and she returned to the Washington, D.C. area to join the MedStar Georgetown University Hospital team as a pediatric oncology nurse practitioner.
Now that she’s been a nurse practitioner for five years, she thinks about Pat Brophy often. Pat was a major influence in Jennifer’s journey toward becoming a nurse practitioner. “I kind of always thought ‘oh, I want to be like her when I grow up’,” she recalls. Unfortunately, Pat passed away 17 years ago and never knew about Jennifer’s career path. “I never got the chance to tell her that I was following in her footsteps, but I hope she would be proud.”
Jennifer’s own footsteps are leaving distinct impressions on people’s lives. “You develop a rapport with each patient and their family,” she says, “I have patients who are infants, young children, adolescents, and some of them young adults. The way I interact with each of them is very different depending on their age, developmental stage, and where they’re at in their treatment.”
The best part of my job is probably when we get to have celebrations with patients, whether it’s a birthday, an end-of-chemo party, or graduation for a patient who has graduated in the course of their treatment.
Jennifer Toth ’11
She recalls one NICU patient who was diagnosed with cancer at just a few days old. “I took care of her throughout her treatment, which was months long. Now, she comes back to the clinic every couple of months, and I’ve seen her grow into a toddler and young school-aged kid.” That long-term relationship with some of the families and patients is one of the things Jennifer loves about oncology as a field.
Her patients have enriched her life in many ways. “I learn something different from every patient and every family,” she says. The arc of what she’s gained ranges from receiving cards, drawings, and craft projects that she treasures — some of which she keeps in her desk drawer to look at for encouragement when she needs it — to profound lessons.
A few years ago, after a tough conversation where she had to deliver a difficult prognosis, a mother pulled her aside in the hallway and said, “I know that must have been hard for you. Thank you for taking care of my daughter and for being so kind to us.” Jennifer says, “Her grace and generosity in that moment — right after receiving the worst news of her life — left a lasting impact on me.”
Jumping into a frozen lake to fundraise for Camp Sunshine, a place for children with life-threatening illnesses, is one way that Jennifer and her family have supported other families for years. “My family attended the summer I finished treatment,” she remembers back to when she was three years old. “It’s a place that the whole family can go — the parents, the siblings — everyone — they all get to go and be with other families going through a similar experience and enjoy a week of fun and respite on a beautiful lake in Maine.”
Each February, year after year, the Toth family jumped into Lake Anne in Reston, Va., with hundreds of others they recruited to participate in an event called Virginia Polar Dip: Freezin’ for a Reason. The family began the effort in 2008 when Jennifer was a Flint Hill 9th grader. “My mom (Gail) was really the driving force behind that. Basically, a full-time job for half the year was planning and pulling it off, but it was a labor of love — a family effort and community effort for sure.”
In Jennifer’s senior year, she recruited Flint Hill students, teachers, and staff, including then Upper School Director Brian Lamont. Even Headmaster Emeritus John Thomas jumped in that year and then again for seven more years. The end of that chapter is bittersweet. “I can’t say I’m sad to not have to jump in the lake every February,” says Jennifer, “but it raised a lot of money to be able to send families from the Mid-Atlantic to camp, and they don’t have to pay to attend.”
A million dollars was the Toth’s fundraising goal — they reached it in 2023, 15 years after taking the first icy plunge! A few hundred families attended Camp Sunshine as a result of the fundraising. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The Toth family continues to volunteer there, something they have done since 1997, a year after they first attended as a participating family. “We had such an awesome experience,” says Jennifer, “that we went back the following year as volunteers and have been volunteering up there ever since. We go up every summer for a week or two. The whole family.”
Together, they also put a spotlight on the importance of scientific studies. Jennifer explains: “In general, my family has been involved in a lot of childhood cancer awareness efforts and have done some lobbying on Capitol Hill for research funding. There’s a group called the Alliance for Childhood Cancer that brings people from the childhood cancer community to advocate for more research funding, and we’ve done a fair amount of advocacy with them as well.”
Every day at work, Jennifer is an advocate for each of her patients. Over time and with experience, her understanding of what that means has grown. She says, “The importance of community support and advocating on behalf of our patients is an important part of my job. Having a diagnosis like cancer affects a lot of people, so much more than an individual patient or family.”
Being on hold with insurance companies, trying to get things approved for patients, or getting denials overturned is when the advocacy becomes very specific to the needs of each family. “Quite a bit of my time is spent fighting with insurance companies to get patients the treatments they need,” Jennifer expresses, “It’s so frustrating because it’s just not necessary for the system to be set up this way.“
Insurance aside, always at the forefront of her mind is a mission to help as many children, like herself, heal and feel comfortable in the most trying circumstances. Jennifer says she accomplishes that mission by “having fun with the kids while addressing their really complex medical problems, providing education and counseling to the parents and families to help normalize the experience, giving them the information and education they need to be able to care for their kids when they go home from the hospital, and helping them get through the treatment experience.”
In pediatric oncology, there are heartfelt highs and lows: “There are patients I take care of who go on to live long happy, healthy lives and then there are patients who unfortunately die very young,” says Jennifer. “I’m passionate about end-of-life and palliative care — helping alleviate suffering and helping patients die well when that is the outcome. I’ve learned from my patients and families how to have hard conversations and focus on what matters in their last days.”
When it comes to the highs, she says, “The best part of my job is probably when we get to have celebrations with patients, whether it’s a birthday, an end-of-chemo party, or graduation for a patient who has graduated in the course of their treatment.”
Thinking about future generations of nurses, she encourages students to consider the endless possibilities: “I think it’s a really exciting profession because there’s so much you can do with it.” She explains that nurse practitioners work closely and collaboratively with physicians and the rest of the team to diagnose and treat patients. “The nurse practitioner role draws on the science and medical side of things as well as having bedside expertise. Nurses get to spend a lot of time with patients, often more than other people on the team do, and I like that the nurse practitioner role bridges those aspects of things.”
Jennifer’s work schedule looks a little different every day, depending on the day. In the morning, she does rounds with the inpatient team to see patients admitted to the hospital. Then, she sees patients in the clinic who arrive for chemotherapy or a procedure or who finished treatment and are there for a follow-up. The remainder of the day may involve doing some procedures, writing notes for the patients she saw earlier, and writing orders for patients to receive chemotherapy. She’ll occasionally help with a clinical research program, give a staff education lecture to a group of nurses, or work with one of the medical students seeing patients with their team of practitioners.
A turntable and a collection of vinyl records are ready to help her unwind when she arrives home after a full and meaningful day. She might also reach for a good book, write a letter to a friend on one of her mechanical typewriters and send it by snail mail — she’s a self-professed “old soul” — go for a bike ride or hike, or maybe explore new restaurants in the Washington area. As salutatorian of Flint Hill’s Class of 2011, Jennifer said this during her graduation speech, “We’ll continue surprising each other with who we’ve become, where we’ve been, and what we’ve accomplished.” Nearly 15 years later, her focus has shifted to who her patients can become, what they can accomplish, and where they and their families can go to find Sunshine. The next 15 years will reveal more surprises, but one thing is certain: she’ll still be advocating for others.